


Never Make Old Bones

by wired



Category: Iron Man (Movieverse), Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Afterlife, Aging, Crossover, Crossover Pairing, Drinking, F/M, Mortality, Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-17
Updated: 2010-05-17
Packaged: 2017-10-11 15:46:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wired/pseuds/wired
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two bright-burning stars contemplate missing the heat death of the universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Make Old Bones

Tony was drinking chlorophyll margaritas, and Taura was drinking some salmon-pink concoction out of a fishbowl-sized snifter. There was a tiny submarine in the bottom of her glass which sometimes bobbed into view as she took a sip. Both of them were drunk.

Taura's feet were propped on the railing, and Tony watched her articulate each toe one at a time to scrape the paint off with her toenails. He was trying to figure out where her purple-painted toenails fell on the Mohs scale of hardness, and how the bioengineers had done that. It was a surprisingly difficult calculation when he didn't know the hardness of the paint, and also because she was talking.

"...want to die, of course, I'm not suicidal. All the dangerous things I've done, you'd think one of them would have killed me, pffsh. Instead there is all this ... waiting around to die, to be all burned out and used up. I'm no good at patience. Not like that."

Tony held his drink up to the light. Yup, still totally opaque. "I always said I wanted to die in bed, when I was 90, with two blondes. At this rate I can have the bed and the blondes, but I'm not even going to get halfway to 90." He glanced over at Taura, and her skin was still warm and radiant, and her hands were still strong and supple, and since she was wearing a sarong, he was pretty sure she didn't have palladium poisoning creeping up off her chest, but her hair was pure white.

_Ching_ went the submarine. "For the last year, I've been volunteering for all the no-hope missions. I can feel myself start to slow down. It seemed like an easy, useful way to go out. But then every time, some 20 year old trooper would put her life on the line to get me out of it, and you can't ... I can't turn down a gift like someone risking their life for mine. They love me too much, they're not rational, and I can't let myself get killed if it will take them with me. I've got plenty of honor guard for my trip to Valhalla as it is."

"Do you really believe that? That there's some wild viking drinking afterlife? If you do believe it, are you sure we're not already there?" Tony saluted her with his glass.

"No, I don't think there's any after. It's awfully hard to take anyone's creation/destruction mythos seriously when you know you were cooked up in a test tube. There are no theists in the clone lab."

Tony rubbed the ring of condensation on the arm of his deck chair. "Sometimes I like to imagine that there is a cosmic do-over button. I don't regret who I am, but I regret, sometimes, that I didn't take the time to slow down and listen. I regret that I talked over people so much, but I can't imagine how I'm going to unlearn that without a decade of practice, and I'm out of time for practicing. I have a lot of regrets."

"I hadn't thought about the advantage of knowing I'd die young. I've always had too little time to do things I'd regret. Or at least to spend regretting things I did. Or things I didn't do." Taura lost herself in the conditionals and stopped talking. Her hand radiated its heat close to Tony's thigh.

Tony shifted his weight a little closer to her as he curled his feet under him. "The worst part is leaving and knowing that everyone else has so much time to be fucked up by it. I am still fucked up by my parents dying, and I never wanted to give some other kid that feeling. When I die, it'll be like a pulsar. I'll burn out and collapse down and be invisible except for these tiny flashes of pain whenever someone thinks about me, looks my direction. For as long as they're alive, the people who love me will hurt, and be pissed off that I died, and no one was supposed to love me at all, that was the plan. No one."

"We both failed at that."

Tony lifted his glass again, even though it was empty. "To us, failures!"

Taura turned in her seat to toast him properly. "Tony."

"Taura."

She waved for him to go first.

"In celebration of our continued failure to be dead, do you want to go have sex?" he said, all in a rush, and with impressively little slurring.

"Exactly." And holding hands, they went inside to burn as brightly as they could.


End file.
